Signs and Symptoms - XIII

Symptoms are the patient's complaints. They are highly subjective and amenable to suggestion and to alterations in the patient's mood and other mental processes.

Reality Sense

The way one thinks about, perceives, and feels reality.

Reality Testing

Comparing one's reality sense and one's hypotheses about the way things are and how things operate to objective, external cues from the environment.

Schneiderian First-rank Symptoms

A list of symptoms compiled by Kurt Schneider, a German psychiatrist, in 1957 and indicative of the presence of schizophrenia. Includes:

Auditory hallucinations

Hearing conversations between a few imaginary "interlocutors", or one's thoughts spoken out loud, or a running background commentary on one's actions and thoughts.

Somatic hallucinations

Experiencing imagined sexual acts couple with delusions attributed to forces, "energy", or hypnotic suggestion.

Thought withdrawal

The delusion that one's thoughts are taken over and controlled by others and then "drained" from one's brain.

Thought insertion

The delusion that thoughts are being implanted or inserted into one's mind involuntarily.

Thought broadcasting

The delusion that everyone can read one's mind, as though one's thoughts were being broadcast.

Delusional perception

Attaching unusual meanings and significance to genuine perceptions, usually with some kind of (paranoid or narcissistic) self-reference.

Delusion of control

The delusion that one's acts, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and impulses are directed or influenced by other people.

Stereotyping or Stereotyped movement (or motion)

Repetitive, urgent, compulsive, purposeless, and non-functional movements, such as head banging, waving, rocking, biting, or picking at one's nose or skin.Common in catatonia, amphetamine poisoning, and schizophrenia.

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